Retail

Identifying and releasing the untapped conversion potential of brands

We are an agency obsessed with retail. As Creative Conversion Specialists we deliver effective creative ideas that leverage a brand’s untapped conversion potential through all the points of its customers’ omnichannel journey.

What we do

Creative for Conversion

To develop creative ideas that make a sustainable commercial impact, we identify motivating and lucrative customer needs and wants and translate these into rich emotional insights. These power big, effective creative ideas which exploit untapped conversion opportunities wherever they exist on the customer journey to deepen brand equity and drive performance growth.

Experiential

Once the preserve of premium retailers, we now harness Experiential Selling for mainstream clients to address big retail challenges such as footfall, trade-down and differentiation. For off-line retailers with heavy investment in bricks and mortar, the retail experience provides one of the best opportunities to challenge the rise of online.

Commercial, Operational & Customer Planning

Through our planning process, we help clients identify and realise the greatest conversion potential of their brands throughout the omnichannel customer journey. Combining commercial data with behavioural consumer and shopper insights we seek to quantify a brand’s greatest available Untapped Conversion. We then build strategies and specialist plans to unlock the greatest share of this with the available budget.

Brand Value Platforms

We understand how critical a clear, actionable and distinctive value platform is to the growth of a brand within the retail sector. We often work with businesses to identify or simply sharpen a brand’s value platform to ensure it is customer-first and at the heart of any omnichannel strategy and is embraced throughout the complex structure of retailing business – whether at a brand, customer, ecommerce, store, service, category or product level. Our experience mapping process helps a business enable a seamless customer-centric journey that reinforces its distinctive brand value platform.

Measurement & Evalutation

Too many communication plans feature previously tried activity without knowledge of its success. The potential wastage far outweighs the cost of even the most basic M&E plan. Recognising the prohibitive cost of the more complex campaigns and programmes, we have created simple campaign dashboards to provide a platform for efficient iterative growth that can sit alongside a business’s existing key performance indicators.

Distribution Partner Sell-In

Clients tell us they can judge the success of a whole quarter on the Retailer response to their sell-in. From commercial planning to bespoke store media plans, activation and even the presentation itself, we have 20 years of experience helping our clients deliver engaging, game-changing Sell-ins.

Creative Communications Framework

We recognise that for many of our clients overcoming commercial or channel driven silos to create a truly customer-first, seamless communication campaign journey can often be a challenge given the complex channel structures and stakeholders of their businesses. This is made more complex by the need to be able to react quickly to short term trading opportunities or challenges that characterise the retail sector. Our communications framework approach is designed to help clients leverage the right creativity, at the right time, in the right place, for the right investment, reflecting a business’s annual customer activity plan. This approach ensures we can deliver a fully optimised campaign execution.

Shopper Insight

Actionable shopper insight is one of the pillars of any successful retail campaign. We have built a number of research partnerships giving our clients access to industry leading methodologies such as coded filming and Shopper Lab. Our planning team then work in conjunction with these partners to translate findings into compelling and effective creative.

Digital Commerce

Our Shopper Decision Mapping is helping our customers to debunk some of the long-held beliefs that have shaped ‘finger-in-the-air’ digital communications. Knowledge of where shoppers go, in which order, and for what purpose, are helping us to shape where we direct investment and the nature of Conversion Content.

Retailer 'Stakeholder' Engagement

Whether at an organisational or channel level, we have an ecosystem of experts, services, products and processes that have been shaped to assist our clients in overcoming the often-connected stakeholder, operational and budgetary issues that can limit a great creative idea from being realised or fully exploited.

Our People

Kerry Bateman CEO, VCCP Retail

Kerry has over 26 years’ experience in Retail marketing. He joined WARL in 1998 and, as one of the original exponents of Shopper Marketing in the UK, founded the agency’s retail division. In the intervening period he has helped sell everything from clothes to cameras, matches to mattresses, spirits to shampoo. In 2013 he brought WARL into VCCP as the Retail arm of the Partnership. As VCCP Retail they have played a key role in a number of major cross functional integrated wins including Canon, Cadbury, Dominos and Speedo.